THE PERFECT COUPLE*

How many shows can we watch where Nicole Kidman plays a beautiful, uptight, brittle, rich woman trapped in a miserable marriage but struggling to hold on to her perfectly manicured life? Enough already.

In this latest iteration she plays a successful murder-mystery writer living in a gorgeous summer house in Nantucket with her handsome husband (Liev Schreiber), hosting the wedding of her second son.  The night before the wedding, the bridesmaid is found drowned and the wedding is cancelled.

Whodunnit? We discover in short order that the bridesmaid was pregnant by the paterfamilias, that the first son is a feckless trader in financial trouble, and the bride is actually in love with the groomsman.  And that's just the first couple of episodes. The set-up is that of a classic Agatha Christie mystery where lots of family members have motives that we have to untangle.  Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman is both a master of PR and selling books, but also trying to move away from her image as part of the "perfect couple".  Her best-selling novels feature a crime detecting couple similar to Christie's Tommy and Tuppence - an alliterative crime-busting perfect husband and wife, and the author's marriage is part of the marketing drive.

The six-part TV show is handsomely cast and handsomely filmed in a lavish Cape Cod mansion. Everyone looks the part.  And yet something about the script and performances feels flat. The show just never takes flight. I never cared. Also, if you know your Christie, the solution is pretty easy to figure out. (More on that in the spoiler section after the release information.)

I think the problem is that while director Susanne Bier is great at creating context and a luxury lifestyle on screen, a murder mystery has to be more than Nora Ephron lifestyle porn. It has to hook us in.  And the modern audience demands more of its murder mysteries, especially those set amongst the super-rich. In a post WHITE LOTUS world, THE PERFECT COUPLE just feels plain vanilla - too straight - too dull - too obvious.  Only the wonderful Dakota Fanning seems to be in a different show and to really be having fun with it.  

THE PERFECT COUPLE debuted on Netflix this week. 

SPOILERS - I have not read the source novel by Elin Hilderbrand but understand that the solution is far more ambiguous in the novel. It tells you everything you need to know about how plain vanilla the adaptation is that they decided to give you a proper murderer and motive and then to tie everything up by having a resolution between the author and the bride too.  The lone attempt to spice things up with the author's sketchy backstory feels very shoehorned in. It didn't cohere.